The present disclosure relates to a device and method for assisting in the visualization of connection relations. Particularly, the present disclosure relates to a device and method for assisting in grasping the contents of an electronic document on a display device with the electronic document displayed thereon.
A desire to roughly grasp the contents of an electronic document, such as an electronic book, may occur. Such a desire may occur when a first-time reader tries to read an electronic document without taking much time, or when a reader who rereads an electronic document tries to find a target portion of the electronic document from a vague memory of when the reader read the electronic document before.
For example, when page-turning of an electronic document is performed page-by-page, the reader reads it from the top to the bottom while understanding the contents page-by-page, resulting in spending much time. Although it is considered to turn multiple pages of the electronic document at a time, this may skip the contents to be read or the target portion. Therefore, techniques for roughly grasping the contents of an electronic document have been conventionally proposed.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-175673 discloses an electronic book display device, in which book information composed of document data is stored in a book data storage part, and the book information is read from the book data storage part and displayed on a book display part sequentially in specific units. When a specific word or phrase, such as a displayed character, is specified, a character data summary-generating algorithm extracts sentences containing the specified word or phrase from already-read portions to generate explanatory text, stores the generated explanatory text in a character data storage part, and displays the contents of the character data storage part to display desired explanatory text.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H07-191974 discloses a display device for analyzing a specified file using a document characteristic analysis program, storing the result in document characteristic information, deciding the display characteristic to a scroll area based on the document characteristic information in a memory, and switching and displaying the display characteristic inside the scroll area.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-334106 discloses a topic-extracting device including, in addition to information-collecting means for collecting documents from information sources, information storage means for storing the collected documents, and topic-extracting means for extracting topics from documents taken out of the information storage means in parallel with processing performed by the information-collecting means to collect documents, identification means and difference-extracting means, wherein the difference-extracting means extracts a difference between the previously collected documents and the documents collected this time among documents whose sources are identified by the identification means, and outputs the difference to the topic-extracting means, and the topic-extracting means extracts topics from the input difference.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H07-262345 discloses a multimedia presentation editing method, in which screen presentation information as spatial layout information on multimedia data is edited by a screen data editing part, screen transition information describing a difference in position information between two-angle image media from two different pieces of screen presentation information is prepared by a differential data preparing part, a state transition time and transition start conditions are input from an input management part, and a scenario is prepared by a scenario preparing part from the screen presentation information and the screen transition information.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2013-003804 discloses an electronic book display device, in which a display history when electronic book data is displayed on display means capable of displaying an electronic book is stored in storage means for each predetermined range, and when electronic book data carried on from the previously read part is displayed on the display means, any piece of summary data is selected based on the display history from among multiple pieces of summary data created for each predetermined range and different in amount of information, and displayed on the display means.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-313485 discloses an electronic book display device for dividing data by prescribed page intervals, fetching data in each page interval or fetching the data of a page with a bookmark attached thereto, and generating multiple thumbnails, wherein among the multiple thumbnails, one is used as a main thumbnail whose size is large, and the other thumbnails in small size are arrayed almost like a V shape to be continued from the upper part and lower part of the main thumbnail diagonally upward and downward.